Simultaneous waterway scheduling, berth allocation, and quay crane assignment: A novel matheuristic approach

Abstract

Maritime shipment plays a pivotal role in goods transportation worldwide. Ships intending to load/unload a cargo should visit a port. Three main steps are taken during this process. Firstly, ships go through a waterway to reach the berthing area. Secondly, they are allocated to eligible wharves, and quay cranes are assigned to them. At last, ships leave the port area through the waterway. In this paper, the three mentioned stages are considered and solved in an integrated manner. A two-way waterway is deemed with the width limitation for ships moving in opposite directions. Furthermore, ships may arrive during the planning horizon. Tidal impacts, draft limit, and safety distance between ships are prominent maritime limitations included in this paper. As the three stages take place consecutively, the problem appears to resemble a hybrid flow shop scheduling problem with unrelated parallel machines, machine eligibility constraint, and shared resources. Following this attitude, a mathematical model is developed. Due to the problem complexity, three distinct matheuristic approaches are developed by combining the genetic algorithm, discrete differential evolution, and grey wolf optimiser with a mathematical model and tested using randomly-generated numerical instances. At last, developed matheuristics are compared, and some managerial insights are provided.